Today is a sad day, for me at least. Anyone familiar with torrents should know about The Pirate Bay. It was in my opinion, the only torrent site worth a damn I could find. According to news reports, TPB has been sold to the software company Global Gaming Factory X. I believe the term "to go legal" means they will charge for downloads...

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers’ need faster downloads and better quality

In other words, we pay for what we download. We also pay for high quality downloads, which we found at TPB for FREE. I understand their reasoning to an extent, but I never saw the day TPB would sell out.. It's truly a sad, sad day.

R.I.P Terry Winstel, you were a musician, a hero, and a well loved man. But above all, you were my dad. Forever in my heart 1953-2009.

The BitTorrent meltdown will not happen. The Pirate Bay is tracking about half of the world’s torrent files, meaning that the site’s tracker servers facilitate the downloads of these files by letting users know who is sharing which bits and pieces. Researchers rang the alarm bells a few months back that shutting down the site’s tracker servers would severely impact sites like Mininova that make use of the Pirate Bay’s infrastructure.

R.I.P Terry Winstel, you were a musician, a hero, and a well loved man. But above all, you were my dad. Forever in my heart 1953-2009.

I hold absolutely nothing against the TPB operators for selling the place. Standing up for what you believe in is a wonderful thing, but it needs to stop when it starts to ruin your life. Good on them for quitting while they were ahead.

Having said that though...this sucks!! TPB was awesome On the other hand, it's satisfying knowing that the guys who bought it probably have less of clue than your average internet user about how to accomplish what they intend to, so the site will end up being nothing more than a fond memory for the people who used it in its heyday.

I better hurry up and search it for all the rarities it holds. Excellent place for Bootlegs, not totally legal, but how can they object when I have all the other albums of the artist purchased legally?

Good on them for all they've done, and they were fighting a losing battle, so it was only a matter of time.

Now its back to Limewire I suppose.....How long p2p last? Maybe we are seeing the end of another period of 'good old days of internet'

Thereby invalidating the whole point of their original arguments and making fools of the people that supported them and spoke out on their behalf? I don't think so.

Deals like this make me wonder if this was part of their plan all along. Especially today, when the business 'strategy' for many startups is not to build a business, but rather to become a big enough thorn in some megacorp's paw that they'll buy you out.

I dunno...to me, it's startin' to sound like the 80s (80's? ) all over again. That's when so many of the former 'anti-war' and 'socially conscious' college crowd went out and got corporate jobs - or went to work for Wall Street.

Back then the saying was: "I didn't sell out - I got smart and bought in."

Can't say I blame them, though. It was all fun and games (and damn, they had fun!), but things ended up a bit personal (and that was entirely their own faults for being so goddamn cocky). A bit of a shame seeing TPB go this way, since there was a lot of interesting stuff there (and yes, a lot of it is actually legit, even if it is some marginally small percentages).

Is this going to stop filesharing? Nah. There's several gigabytes/sec going on that has nothign to do with TPB.

I must admit Hertz Man has a point. The public support (specifically the financial kind) is now in the toilet - not cool. I still stand by what I said though, I'm not sure how else this could have gone down in the end.

My first thought is this is a total waste of money on the buyers' parts. This business venture is going to be just as successful as when Napster first went from a software piracy model to a pay-to-play model. 99% of the people that visited TPB have no interest in paying for that stuff & that's not going to change. Those people will just go away and find other ways to get what they want.

Torrents are tolerable when you are getting something for nothing. Whether that be something that has a price attached to it or something that is so large (like a 5 DVD Linux distro) that's impractical for most people to host on their own sites, but who is going to pay for the 'privilege' to use torrents when a very large portion of ISPs throttle torrent traffic. Who in the right mind is going to buy a DVD (that's 4-9 GB) or a Blu-Ray (Up to 25+ GB) and download it at 10-20 KB/sec speeds? I'll leave the math to you to figure out how many weeks you'll need to let your PC run 24/7 to get that Blu-Ray image of the new Transformers movie.

For those of you using torrents for less-than-respectable purposes torrents are awful for that. They are insecure and it's very easy for The Man to identify you & what you're doing. My advice is if you really want that content then find a way to get it that is far less likely to get you a cease & desist letter from your ISP.

So if you were making a point, and it started to impact your personal life, to the tune of millions of dollars, you'd keep on in the same direction? People supported and spoke out, but weren't on the front lines putting their lives on the line. It's easy to support, a lot harder to spearhead...

Oh, I couldn't agree with you more Mr. E. I personally don't think something like what they were doing was worth going to jail for. (Then again, I didn't set up a torrent, shoot my mouth off, thumb my nose at the courts, and generally act like the back end of a pony during my 15 minutes of fame - but that's just me.)

Still, to hear all their hype and pseudo-socialist posturing, I would have given them credit for a little more grit and backbone than they showed when it started getting real. By now, I think it's fairly obvious Pirate Bay was little more than children playing at 'dress-up' games rather than a movement by people who truly believed in what they were doing.

And that saddens me. Because every protest, or other act of civil disobedience, has a window in which to effect real change. Pirate Bay had that window. They had support. They had sympathetic press coverage. They had the public and the politico's attention. Serious questions were being raised. Even the courts were uncomfortable issuing a decision that the current laws virtually compelled them to make. And everybody (including the music industry) was waiting for the next round of the battle to begin.

And then Pirate Bay walked away...

Even worse, when they took an industry offered "out" these Pirates became Janissaries.

The real problem is that Pirate Bay left their supporters holding the bag. Now it will be ten times harder to get people to back the next person who decides to lock horns with the media giants - even if that person is willing to take it all the way. And it will also embolden the media monopoly to push harder since I'm sure they are now convinced that they can intimidate anybody in the end. And so far, the media monopoly is absolutely correct in thinking that way. And they'll remain correct until someone shows them otherwise.

Idealism is not dead: The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!

Idealism is not dead: The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!

But sadly, I have a feeling TPB will lost most of their users. Its inevitable, TPB was an amazing site, but it wasn't one of a kind. With sites like demonoid and mininova people will just make the transition. Paying for content from TPB would be like buying a pound of apples at the market when you could walk down the road, and pick the apples from a tree, that are of the same quality. I would love to see TPB thrive.. But at the same time, I don't wish to see Global Gaming Factory X thrive. TPB was started for the people, Global Gaming Factory X just wants the money out of the deal..

R.I.P Terry Winstel, you were a musician, a hero, and a well loved man. But above all, you were my dad. Forever in my heart 1953-2009.

I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - We're just gonna chop your nuts off and make you pay for the same shit you got for free a few months ago! But really don't worry, it only stings a little! Hell we got our's cut off right before we decided to sell the company!

R.I.P Terry Winstel, you were a musician, a hero, and a well loved man. But above all, you were my dad. Forever in my heart 1953-2009.

I never understood what TPB crew believed in. Any time I saw them interviewed, the argument seemed to be "everything should be free for everyone", or "it's there, I want it, I don't have to pay for it, I'll take it".

Which is, of course, no argument at all. Now on the other hand...

IF:

They had taken the trouble to validate the quality of every download made available, and

charged torrent users a "reasonable fee" (let's say 25c for the sake of argument) for each illegal film download, and

given every penny to the film companies, saying "this is what we think a film download is worth"....

then I might have had more time for them. I still wouldn't have agreed with what they do, but it would have been some form of argument, something to debate. And the film companies would have had some revenue stream for their product, however small. Instead, the torrent sites just facilitate theft. Where's the nobility in that?

And for the record, I find it very odd that many people is this thread seem to support TPB, whereas in other threads DC members always urge each other to support shareware developers by paying up. What's different?

I've always supported TPB, I'm a strong believer of donation-ware. I believe if someone wants to pay for software they should be given a choice. When I see a piece of software I really like and can see as useful, I hate clicking on it to find out it is $89.99. There is no way in hell I'm gonna come up with $89.99 with the economy the way it is. But say the programmer says "If you like this program please donate", and I love the program. The next time I get some donationcredits or extra cash I'll donate. I believe freedom of choice is something this country, and other democratic countries were found on.

Some of you might say, you have freedom of choice, if your too cheap to fork out $89.99, go for the freeware. Problem with freeware is its not always quality. Most oftenly it isn't, no offense to any freeware programmers. I see freeware every day that makes me think "That's free! Wow they could make a fortune with this", In example the programs on donationcoder. I never said I supported pirated software, but at the same time, I support freedom of choice, and that is what TPB was about.

R.I.P Terry Winstel, you were a musician, a hero, and a well loved man. But above all, you were my dad. Forever in my heart 1953-2009.

And for the record, I find it very odd that many people is this thread seem to support TPB, whereas in other threads DC members always urge each other to support shareware developers by paying up. What's different?

The difference is that shareware developers believe in the 'try before you buy' principle whereas Hollywood and the music industry believe in 'make money and stuff the consumer'.

The whole business of paying artists for their work is totally bogus - the music industry has ceased to employ musicians or anyone with talent precisely because that can get talentless bimbos and himbos to perform like trained monkeys, pay them peanuts until the end of their shelf life (usually 2 weeks) and then screw massive amounts of money out idiots who are prepared to buy the crap.

Many reputable and talented musicians don't see fans as the big problem - they see the music industry as the big mproblem and is one of the reasons that many older bands are out on the road playing to packed out venues - that way they earn some money and give fans real pleasure.

Finally I used TPB to watch TV programs that I can't watch in the UK because they often don't get shown here but go straight to DVD. The net effect of that is that I have bought many DVDs that I otherwise wouldn't have purchased because I would have no way to 'try before you buy'. Similarly with some musicians I have discovered and having found I liked them went out and bought their CDs (preferably direct from them so they get some of the profit).

TPB isn't all bad and I know my experience of using is as a 'try before you buy' service isn't at all uncommon - so much so that many musicians actively encourage the distribution of their music as a marketing tool to generate gate and sales income.

The whole business of paying artists for their work is totally bogus - the music industry has ceased to employ musicians or anyone with talent precisely because that can get talentless bimbos and himbos to perform like trained monkeys, pay them peanuts until the end of their shelf life (usually 2 weeks) and then screw massive amounts of money out idiots who are prepared to buy the crap.

But this is not an argument for TPB. Idiots buy lots of idiotic things, and businesses queue up to sell rubbish to idiots. That's capitalism, folks. Those of us who are not idiots exercise our awesome right not to buy rubbish, or to refuse to buy products that we cannot "try before we buy". The power of capitalism cuts both ways.

I really didn't want to start yet another debate about whether torrent sites are a good thing, I was just surprised to see DC members supporting these sites (which also permit illegal software downloads, of course).

And I agree that there are reasonable uses for torrent sites. Downloading last night's EastEnders, while strictly speaking unlawful, seems reasonable to me, because (a) I can't imagine the BBC being able to demonstrate any "conseqential loss" and (b) there's an argument (yet to be tested in court) that it might fall under "fair use" -- the equivalent of swapping a video tape with your neighbour (presuming it is EastEnders or other similar free-to-air material we're talking about -- for all non-UK members, I should add that EastEnders is a soap opera made by the BBC).

But no, in general, I believe if you don't like the product on offer, don't buy it. Downloading it for free just because you don't like the way the industry works doesn't make it more noble or lawful.

But no, in general, I believe if you don't like the product on offer, don't buy it. Downloading it for free just because you don't like the way the industry works doesn't make it more noble or lawful.

Some people are less fortunate, and can't afford all the high end software, and end up being very very talented. There are 14 and 15 year olds that are designing amazing CG work, and going on to be successful artists, who eventually pay for the program they once pirated. I believe, and can honestly think I see no harm in it, if say someone downloads Adobe Photoshop Cs4 to better their skills. I'm not saying it's okay for them to go and get rich off the product. But at the same time, why should we say how bad downloading a usually expensive program for free to simply learn a new trade is a bad thing? In a world where education is at an all time low, I honestly think that helps. Charging someone 3000 dollars for 3DS max is like charging a student to use a book its ridiculous. Why should they have to pay to learn? Growing up I've been preached too about how important education is, yet why should I have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to get that education? Tuition fees in college are ridiculous. It's the same with the new age development tools. I'm done with my rant.. I've said what I think needed to be said.

Johnk, I'm not trying to guide any disrespect your way, I understand what you mean. I respect your beliefs, but at the same time I think I have a valid argument.

R.I.P Terry Winstel, you were a musician, a hero, and a well loved man. But above all, you were my dad. Forever in my heart 1953-2009.